..“It was the financial crisis, what it revealed about government-Wall Street links, and the fumbling of the response to it that put the nail in the coffin of trust in government,” Daron Acemoglu, an economist at MIT, wrote in reply to my questions. “Once trust in government was destroyed, those that had not benefited from the previous boom years became particularly easy pickings for populist rhetoric.”

.. In March 2010, two months after Citizens United was decided, President Obama signed the Affordable Healthcare Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, a programmany in the white middle and working classes perceived as reducing their own medical care in order to provide health coverage to the disproportionately minority poor.

.. Voter anger was directed at two targets — the “undeserving rich” and the “undeserving poor.”

.. The intersection of inequality driven by real wage/income stagnation and the fact that the folks perceived to have blown the damn economy up not only recovered first, but got government assistance in the form of bailouts to do so. If you’re in the anxious middle and that doesn’t deeply piss you off, you’re an unusually forgiving person.

.. The core theme of Republican establishment lore has been to demonize not unregulated finance or trade or inequality, but ‘the other’ – e.g., the immigrant or minority taking your job and claiming unneeded government support. And yet, none of their trickle down, deregulatory agenda helped ameliorate the problem at all. So they lost control.

.. If he is forced out of the fight, his supporters will remain bitter and enraged, convinced that a self-serving and malign elite defeated their leader.

If he prevails, a constituency that could force politicians to confront the problems of the working and middle class will waste its energies on a candidate incompetent to improve the lives of the credulous men and women lining up to support him.